Hi everyone,
Here is a new status update on our progress. All in all, the game is progressing well into a release state, as we complete the last features and content, and fix bugs.
Some Recent Additions
On the gameplay side, we have completed the faction customization panel. Currently the edition only contains the traits of the current major factions, but the game designers are now adding more traits to enrich the database. We are also continuing to beef up the diplomacy, in terms of content and interactivity. That is especially true on the AI which is now able to handle commercial and research agreements. One of our incoming tasks consists into giving more information to the user concerning the AI diplomatic decisions, so that you understand its actions.
Victory conditions have been expanded to seven types, and a new Status Screen has been created to show empire graphs (similar to the one at the game end) and status towards victory, for empires which have diplomatic relations with the player. The battle also continues to be improved with a new retreat mode, and special battle abilities such as parasiting (I have also been told about a certain bird and egg thing). We are in the process of adding an acceleration option to the battle animations, which has highly been requested by the community.
The AI
Regarding AI, the team is made of 5 programmers, with their fellow designers: they are steadily advancing. The AI is almost feature complete ; we are missing a few advanced diplomatic elements and marketplace interactions. There is something healthy in the way the last bricks are added, because they involve refactoring and normalizing the game data and architecture so that everything is consistent. For instance, the ability to buy strategic resources in the marketplace has lead us to rewrite a common resource acquirement pattern, mixing mining / diplomacy / marketplace. There is still a lot of room for tuning and optimizing the AI, and this will be our next focus.
A Tutorial & Playtesters
The tutorial is well under way, and the first results are more than encouraging. We should welcome our first guinea pigs (not pugs) at the Amplitude offices to try it out this week. Endless Legend is a complex game, so there is still a lot of information to explain in the first instructions; the good thing is that the more you progress, the easier it is to explain game notions as core mechanics have already been assimilated. We have tried to find the right mix of a playable tutorial and controlling the player actions so that s/he does not get lost.
New Factions
We now have 2 more factions to release. The < unknown_faction > is nearly complete, and the VIP have been already testing it since last Friday. I know you are very eager to test the < unknown_faction >, especially with their < unknwown_ability >, and we will likely release it mid-august, so that you can give us feedback before the release. Concerning the Cultists of the Eternal End, they are well advanced in terms of 3D characters production, ship, city blocks, and the animation production has started. Their specific gameplay, however original and exotic, already gives nightmares to the programmers. Gamebreaking is cool, but it is not engineers-friendly! Still, we are trying our best to get the cultists ready for release.
Multiplayer
We had the chance to play some multiplayer games with the community. There were a few issues and GUI frustration, which are being fixed or have already fixed, but all in all, the experience seems smooth. I think we are already well above the multiplayer experience of Endless Space when it was released, and we are still adding some polishing steps.
Bug Fixing
In terms of bug fixing, we see no major trouble. The bugs are registered in our database with severities from S1 (blocker) to S5 (trivial). Currently, there are no S1 bugs, around 80 S2 bugs, and then a bunch S3 and S4 bugs. With the team we have, we should be able to take care of most of them. The only concerning issues are random bugs which are difficult to reproduce: some very rare cases of desync, a few army behavior errors. The other concern is the out of memory on 32 bits systems. We have already optimized the graphical memory to gain several hundreds of megabytes, and we are still looking for other areas to optimize.
As I stated in the beginning of this message, it feels to us that the pieces are setting together nicely. Except for the last remaining features / content, it feels like we are in polish mode, which is reassuring for a release objective. We hope to give you a new build by the end of this week, so that you can try out the latest cool stuff.
Thanks for your attention!
AmpliMath